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French Journalist Killed in Syria as Observer Mission Frays

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French Journalist Killed in Syria as Observer Mission Frays

By Robert Mackey January 11, 2012 5:04 pmJanuary 11, 2012 5:04 pm

As my colleague Nada Bakri reports, a French television journalist was killed on Wednesday in the Syrian city of Homs in a rocket attack on a pro-government rally that left at least seven others dead.

The journalist, Gilles Jacquier, 43, had traveled to Homs with government permission, according to a report on the attack posted online by his network, France 2.

The cameraman working with Mr. Jacquier, Christophe Kenck, told France 2 that they were interviewing merchants on a street in Homs when an apparently spontaneous demonstration in favor of the government broke out. The rockets were fired as they filmed the rally.

Video posted on YouTube by Addounia TV, a private Syrian satellite channel said to be under the control of close allies of President Bashar al-Assad, appeared to show the aftermath of the attack in graphic detail. (Please be warned that the Addounia report includes video of badly wounded or dead people.)

At the start of the Addounia report, Reuters explains, after an explosion in the distance, “a man tells the camera in Arabic, ‘this is terrorism.'”

According to a Syrian activist based in Beirut, Lebanon, Shakeeb Al-Jabri, at one stage in Addounia’s report on the attack, a citizen seemed anxious to discount the idea that the rocket fire might have come from government forces. Holding up a shell for the camera, the man explained that it was “an Energa,” a brand of anti-tank weapon not used by Syria’s security forces.

A spokesman for France 2, Thierry Thuillier, told BFM TV that Mr. Jacquier and Mr. Kenck were working in Homs with the express permission of the Syrian government. Syria’s official news agency confirmed that the crew was part of a delegation of French-speaking reporters taken to the city by the information ministry.

The news agency added, “The Ministry of Information stresses that the act is an extension of the terror chain Syria is exposed to, adding that it comes in the context of the terrorists’ bid to distort the real image of what is happening in Syria.”

Syrian activists called the attack on journalists in an area of the city loyal to the government suspicious.

Nic Robertson, a CNN correspondent who was in the same part of Homs on a government-run media tour just a few minutes before the attack reported that he saw Mr. Jacquier about 10 minutes before he was killed.

According to Mr. Robertson, he and other foreign journalists, escorted by government officials, had been brought to that part of the city, which is a bastion of support for President Bashar al-Assad, to interview citizens who said they had been the victims of previous attacks by insurgents. At the end of that part of the tour, Mr. Robertson reported: “We were told… that there was a pro-regime rally, and we were told by the government minders who were escorting us that we should go and cover it. All the journalists on the bus, and there was a small group of a dozen or so of us, said, ‘No, we’d rather go back to Damascus.'”

Then, Mr. Robertson said, “Just as we were driving away, about a hundred yards from where we’d been attending that government event, we saw Gilles and a cameraman walking up the street with a small group… going to cover the rally.”

When Mr. Robertson and the other reporters heard about the attack just minutes later as they drove back to Damascus, he said, the government officials who mentioned the rally insisted that insurgents must have attacked it because they somehow found out that foreign journalists would be present.

Mr. Robertson added that another foreign journalist who was present at the attack that killed Mr. Jacquier said that an initial mortar round attracted the attention of reporters, who were then fired upon as they investigated the damage it caused.

Mr. Jacquier, was a veteran war correspondent for the program “Envoyé Spécial,” on France 2. “He was a reporter who also shot his own footage and had spent two decades covering numerous conflicts, from Algeria in the 1990s to Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, the Balkans and the Arab Spring,” Angelique Chrisafis of The Guardian reported from Paris.

A video tribute to Mr. Jacquier produced by his colleagues at French public television includes footage of his interview with Seif al-Isalm el-Qaddafi in Libya last year and notes that he was shot while reporting from the West Bank in 2002.

James Bennet, a correspondent for The New York Times in 2002, witnessed Mr. Jacquier’s calm response to being shot then, and published an account of the episode in The Times the next day.

The deadly attack in Homs came hours after an Algerian member of the Arab League team of observers in Syria told Al Jazeera that he was quitting because “the mission was a farce and the observers have been fooled.” The frustrated observer, Anwar Malek, said the mission was pointless because “the regime orchestrated it, and fabricated most of what we saw.”

Mr. Malek, a writer who is a frequent guest on Arab-language satellite channels, also told Al Jazeera:

What I saw was a humanitarian disaster. The regime is not just committing one war crime, but a series of crimes against its people. …

The regime didn’t meet any of our requests. In fact, they were trying to deceive us and steer us away from what was really happening toward insignificant things. They didn’t withdraw their tanks from the streets; they just hid them and then redeployed them after we left. The snipers are everywhere shooting at civilians. People are being kidnapped. Prisoners are being tortured and no one has been released. …

I’ve seen snipers on top of buildings. On one, there were even army officers in front of the building while snipers were on the roof. Some of our team prefer to maintain good relations with the regime, and denied that there were snipers.

The regime has gained a lot of time and that has helped it implement its plan. They wanted to use this mission, and they’ve spent spies and intelligence officers along with our teams to act as drivers and minders to gather information. And then as soon as we left an area, they attacked people.

Mr. Malek’s testimony that snipers remain in place, despite a commitment from Syria to withdraw its forces from cities, put him at odds with the leader of the observer mission, Lt. Gen. Mohamed al-Dabi, who is a former head of Sudan’s military intelligence agency.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Malek posted a link on Twitter to video of himself in Homs with General Dabi. Days later, after another observer was recorded on video saying that he had seen snipers with his own eyes, the general insisted that his colleague’s remarks had been misunderstood.

Later on Wednesday, a second member of the observer mission told Reuters by telephone from Syria that he was planning to quit, too.

The monitor, who asked not to be identified, told the news agency that he agreed with what Mr. Malek said about the Arab League mission. “It does not serve the citizens. It does not serve anything,” he said. “The Syrian authorities have exploited the weakness in the performance of the delegation.” By way of example, he said that Syrian military gear was still present in a mosque in Dara’a, the southern city where the uprising began last March, despite requests from the delegation to remove it.

According to Reuters, the monitor also said, “There is suffering, a lot of suffering, more than you imagine.”

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